A Makeshift Navy Struggles to Respond to Hurricane Harvey

Rescuers with Houston residents evacuated from their flooded homes during Tropical Storm Harvey.

Photograph by David J. Phillip / AP

Last August, when a freak
storm unexpectedly dumped three times more water on Louisiana than did
Hurricane Katrina, John Bridgers got his twenty-and-a-half-foot bass
boat out. He lives in Watson, a town of nine hundred people northeast of
Baton Rouge, which was battered by thirty-one inches of rain during a
storm that barely registered outside the state. Bridgers knew help was
coming from the Coast Guard, the state Department of Wildlife and
Fisheries, and other agencies, but it wouldn’t be enough. “We’re all
sportsmen around here,” he said. “Pretty much every other person has a
boat. So we got going.”

Bridgers started a Facebook group called Cajun Navy
2016, after the famed
all-volunteer flotilla of Louisiana boatmen and women who were credited
with rescuing more than ten thousand people during Katrina. Over the
next several days, Bridgers’s volunteers used jon boats, motorboats,
bass boats, and even canoes to rescue people from flooded homes and
pluck them off rooftops. Thirteen people lost their lives, but local media said
that the death toll would have been higher if it weren’t for volunteers
like the Cajun Navy 2016. “When you pull up to an individual’s house and
they’re wading out of five feet of water with a duffel bag over their
head, and you pull them into your boat, you realize that’s all they’ve
got in that moment,” Bridgers told me, on Sunday. “That stays with you,
for good and bad.”

This weekend, as Hurricane Harvey barrelled toward Houston, Bridgers and
about three dozen Cajun Navy 2016 members loaded up their boats and hit
the road on the four-and-a-half-hour drive to Houston. About twenty
made it to the western edge of the city, but traffic and flooding
prevented them from getting closer. They called Bridgers and other
members and urged them to wait. Bridgers pulled over at a truck stop,
settled into his seat, and logged onto Facebook. He put out the word
out that the Cajun Navy 2016 Facebook page, which has fifty thousand
followers, could help coördinate volunteer efforts. “Please Like and
Share the page so that we can again make a difference during yet another
disaster,” he wrote. Pleas for help started rolling in as people told
Bridgers where their grandparents, neighbors, and kids were stranded.
“Two Adults lady is 7 months pregnant,” one post read. “3 lil ones under
the age of 4,” another said. “Two elderly in 80s, One in wheelchair. 1
Adult...2’ of water in house right now,” another read. One message said
that several senior citizens were “sitting in water chest deep” in a
nursing home. Bridgers hoped that a volunteer or first responder might
get wind of the message and head for a home they might otherwise
have missed. None of this was possible during Katrina, in 2005, he noted,
when Facebook was primarily used by college students, and volunteers had
to be onsite to help save lives. “Say, during this whole ordeal, you
help a thousand people this way—you would have helped a lot,” he told
me.

Late Sunday afternoon in Houston, the mayor, Sylvester Turner,
said that local police and fire officials had received six thousand calls for
rescue, and more than a thousand people had successfully been saved,
many plucked from roofs and attics. Turner said that 911
operators had received more than fifty-six thousand calls since the storm
began. “We have not been able to keep up with all of the 911 calls that
are coming in,” he said at a briefing. “But it is our intent to respond
and to take in anyone that calls.” The official death toll stood at
five, but it was unclear what was happening in large parts of the city,
or whether the situation would worsen as flooding intensified.

Television-news anchors warned viewers to stay out of attics where they
could be trapped by rising water—or to bring an ax so they could hack a
hole in the roof and climb out to safety. Officials said that Houston,
the country’s fourth-largest city, had already suffered billions of
dollars in damage, and that it would take years for the metropolitan
area, home to six million people, to fully recover.

The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, said that three thousand National
Guard members were helping hundreds of local police and firefighters carry
out rescues. Sixteen helicopters and six hundred water vessels criss-crossed the city. Unlike during Katrina, when New Orleans residents were told not to attempt boat rescues on their own, some
government officials in Texas were encouraging it. The police
department in League City, just south of Houston, put out a
call for private citizens with flat-bottom or shallow-water boats to lend a
hand. The department was quickly overwhelmed with offers of help.

“We literally have hundreds of names and numbers and not enough manpower
to go around,” the department posted, on Facebook. “If we do not contact you please do not think that we do
not appreciate your offer. We are simply overwhelmed with the number of
offers for help.”

The local ABC affiliate posted video of volunteer motorboats maneuvering around submerged vehicles on a badly
flooded street in Dickinson, Texas. A Fox affiliate broadcast
video of a volunteer rescue boat that had taken on stranded people in
Friendswood, including several small children weighed down by large
backpacks, and a woman carrying a baby on her chest.

Offers of assistance poured in from as far away as Philadelphia, but
Louisianans, in particular, vowed to help. Bridgers, the Cajun Navy 2016
organizer, and other Baton Rouge-area residents said they remembered how
the Texas National Guard mobilized during Katrina, and recalled the donations sent
by Texans after last year’s flood. “It’s more of a reciprocal gift of
love back to them for what they did for us last year, plus we know they
need it,” a Baton Rouge woman who was organizing a supply drive to a
Houston church told the city newspaper, the Advocate. “How many
times has Louisiana been in the crossfire, and how many times have
people from other places helped us?”

As the sun set on Sunday, it was impossible to know how many Texans
trapped by flooding had been rescued and how many remained in danger. An
estimated four hundred billion gallons of water had engulfed the Houston
area, and rain was expected to continue for days. Bridgers planned to
keep posting on Facebook all night in hopes of spurring more rescues.
When the water recedes and the camera crews move on, he told me, his
crew’s real work would begin. A year after the devastating flood in his
Louisiana town, Cajun Navy 2016 is still helping coördinate
volunteer efforts to rebuild homes. Bridgers plans to use the group’s
Facebook page to pitch in with Houston’s rebuilding effort, too. “Once
that water’s gone, they’re not gonna have homes to go to,” he said. “I
can relate, ’cause I’ve been there.”